Jihad Union hard-pressed to explain strange statement

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Sep 12, 2007, 19:36 GMT

Istanbul - The statement claiming reponsibility for planning an attack on the US airbase in Germany's Ramstein earlier in the week by the Islamic Jihad Union from Uzbekistan is considered to be genuine by German's Interior Ministry, but the message published on the internet raised more questions than it answered.

Firstly, why would a terrorist organization admit to planning an attack that has already been prevented by the security forces in the planning stages?

The court appearances of two German Muslims and a Turk who were arrested on September 5 in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for plotting attacks in Germany were certainly complicated when the Islamic Jihad Union declared them 'our brothers.'

Secondly, the internet message said that there would be further attacks against US and Uzbek consulates in Germany. At the same time, the message directed less criticism at the US than at Germany which uses the US airbase for logistical support to German troops in Afghanistan.

Thirdly, the message appeared in Arabic and Turkish. The Arabic was only used for quotations from the Koran, which is no surprise for an Islamist group, but the question remains why the terrorists used flawless Turkish for the message and not the Cyrillic script normally used in Uzbekistan.

The website on which the message was published claimed that the Islmaic Jihad Union was part of a global network of terrorists that is close to the ideology of the al-Qaeda organization, that is if the website is to be believed as genuine and not a fake site set up by the secret services to entice terrorist sympathizers.

The website shows a martyrs' gallery in which there appears a picture of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed by US forces in Iraq in June 2006.

Al-Zarqawi founded the al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad terrorist organization in Iraq shortly after the fall of former president Saddam Hussein. He soon changed the group's name to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamic Jihad Union's message had parallels with other messages from al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden: it claimed to have issued a verbal warning to the Uzbek government, the US and Germany to stop fighting Islam.

Only when these verbal warnings are ignored will the terrorist group turn to violence to meet its ends, it claims.

How an Uzbek terrorist group managed to recruit two German converts and a Turk was not revealed by the extremists.

The message did make a link between planned attacks in Germany and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan for the first time, but it threw up more questions than it answered.